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Ask HN: Will crowd-source-coding work?

3 points by trailsix ↗ HN
I just finished reading the Frustrated post by iamjonlee and have to agree that misery loves company! Look at all of the responses. I feel jon's pain. Judging by the responses there seems to be many failures before reaching success. So the message is persistence...

While I'm not ready to call my latest venture a failure by any means, it is much slower to pick up then I thought when I began coding it 8 months ago.

So as not to repeat the same rate of adoption I am doing things differently this time. I would like to get you involved from the start. The idea remains the same - a site for topic based discussions, but that's the only parameter.

Everything else is up to us as a community to decide. This is a chance to fix (or not include at all) the problems we see with other social communities. We have the ability to add features that "solve problems" instead of just looking cool. Essentially we will be crowd-source-coding a new site.

Interested in the project? Here is a bare bones prototype to get started.

http://launchpile.com/crowdsource/

5 comments

[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 21.7 ms ] thread
DanBC
The topics menu switches order. that makes it hard for me to know what's going on.

(This is a friendly comment, even if it seems terse.)

trailsix
i'm pulling random results for topics but since there are only a few of them it appears to switch around. once there are too many topics to list how do we order them? alpabetically, by comment count, trending, etc. it's open for discussion. good catch!
dkador
How is this different from design-by-committee, aka "too many chefs"?
trailsix
It would be design by committee if every idea gets incorporated as a feature due to a lack of vision and leadership. That's not what I'm after.

What I'm suggesting is more like poll the audience in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. While you would think that phoning a friend or reducing the answers to 50/50 odds would give you the best chances, polling the audience returns a correct answer 91% of the time.

I'll accept all ideas to improve the existing product, but only those that are vetted through both the community and me will be implemented.

It won't succeed if everyone is a chef. I don't think it will succeed if I am the only chef either. So I aim to find a happy medium.

padwiki
I would suggest being more direct in stating exactly what the site is and especially how it can benefit the user. Right now it has a "this is a thing I built" kind of vibe, which is not great for driving signups.

Find out what the real problem you are solving is and really focus saying exactly how you solve it.